What Has Vienna To Do With Jerusalem? Barth, Brahms, And Bernstein’s Unanswered Question

by Kevin Vanhoozer

Kevin J. Vanhoozer is Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The following paper was given at Westminster’s ninth annual Contemporary Issues Conference “Faith and the Arts, “March 7–9, 2000).

I. Theology and the Arts: Some Unanswered Questions

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, reason with faith, philosophy with theology? This question, first posed by Tertullian, the father of Latin theology, at the end of the second century, was meant to be rhetorical: intellectual speculation in his view has nothing to do with revelation—the knowledge of God that comes from God. Tertullian’s question, if not his answer, has proved to be a fruitful one across the centuries, provoking stimulating discussions and, not least, inspiring the title of the Festschrift for Cornelius Van Til.

1. Vienna as metaphor of music

My concern in this article, however, is different. It has to do with the relation of faith and the arts, in particular, with classical music. What does Vienna—a city with three centuries of ties to composers, from Mozart to Mahler—have to do with Jerusalem? What do the three B’s—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—have do to with their theological counterparts: Barth, Bultmann, and Brunner? Vienna is an apt metaphor not only for classical music but for Western culture and aesthetics in general; for the various styles of music in Vienna constitute aural illustrations of the intellectual and spiritual history of Europe.

Vienna continues to be associated with classical music, particularly the waltz, and the concerts of Johann Strauss, Jr., that, thanks to PBS, traditionally ring in the New Year. Waltzes such as “Vienna Life” perfectly convey the culture of nineteenth-century Viennese bourgeois society: all sweetness and light, giddiness and froth, the lightness of being bubbling up from the bottom of a glass of champagne. Strauss’s music expresses and reinforces the Zeitgeist of his day. He wrote music for dancing one’s cares away, music that expresses the shallow joy of the leisured class. Strauss’s music is enjoyable, to be sure, but it lacks prophetic power. His music is entertaining, but of no great consequence.[1] Some culture critics would go further. Karl Marx, one of the so-called masters of suspicion, might well have applied what he said about religion to music too: it is the opiate of the people.

In 1908, another Viennese composer, Arnold Schoenberg, abandoned his attempt to preserve tonality (e.g., writing in a particular tonal “key”) in music.[2] His Op. 11 (“Three Piano Pieces”), written only nine years after Johann Strauss’s death, represented a sea-change in western music: a fateful step beyond tonality to non-tonality. Indeed, according to at least one historian of music, 1908 marks the beginning of the end of the cultural optimism that characterized nineteenth-century Europe. There was something else in the air: “a disturbance, a prescient feeling that all this smug optimism can’t last—neither tonality, nor figurative painting, nor syntactical poetry, nor, indeed, the seemingly endless growth of the bourgeoise.”[3] Taken together, the 150 years or so of music composed in Vienna from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century is perhaps “the most extraordinary concentration of genius in one medium in one place since the Florentine Renaissance.”[4] What was happening in Vienna, and what bearing could it have on Jerusalem?

2. Bernstein’s question

One interesting approach to our subject is via Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures, entitled “The Unanswered Question,” a series of six talks delivered at Harvard University.[5] In these lectures Bernstein explores the meaning of music by means of a bold working hypothesis, namely, that there may be a universal in-born musical grammar, just as there is, according to Noam Chomsky, a universal grammar underlying human speech.

Music as “language of the spirit”?

Music has been called “the universal language of mankind,” “the most spiritual of the arts,” “the language of emotions.” Bernstein’s lectures breathe new life into these clichés thanks to recent developments in linguistics. He devotes the first lecture to phonology (the study of sound), the second to syntax (the study of structure), and the last four chapters to semantics (the study of meaning). Yet, though he accepts the premise that music is a kind of language, Bern-stein resists the idea that it is “spiritual.” On the contrary, music is supremely physical: it is basically a matter of sound waves. “It is made of mathematically measurable elements: frequencies, durations, decibels, intervals.”[6] After all, one cannot waltz in a vacuum.

Theologians and musicians, if not kindred spirits, should at least acknowledge a common stake in this debate about the nature of music. For both music and theology have traditionally been thought to partake of the transcendent. A purely physical explanation of music risks being as reductionistic of its phenomenon as does a sociobiological explanation of the phenomenon of human love. More to the point: theology and music alike are susceptible to reductionistic explanations—physics for music; psychology or sociobiology for theology.

From physics to semantics, mathematics to meaning

Bernstein begins his phonological examination of the language of music at its most basic level: the level of sound. Sound is produced by physical bodies that, when vibrating, send out “waves” of air. A musical tone is the result of a regular vibration in the air. If one takes a string and plucks it, one hears not only the tone, but the so-called “overtones” as well. When a string vibrates, it does so not only as a whole but also in segments (e.g., halves, thirds, fourths, etc.). Our ears hear not only the sound of the whole vibrating string, but also the sound of the two halves of the string (exactly an octave higher), and the sound of the string vibrating in three parts (a fifth higher). For example, the C string on a piano two octaves below middle-C produces overtones of the C an octave higher, the G a fifth away, another C (a fourth higher than the previous G), and an E (a third higher than the previous tone). The purely physical event of a C string vibrating, in other words, produces a C major triad—an “event” that contains in nuce the history of Western music, with its tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant harmonies. Bernstein declares: “Those three universal notes [viz., C, G, and E] are handed to us by Nature on a silver platter.”[7] The history of music is the story of the exploration of these overtones, beginning in the West with the exploration of the intervals of the fourth and fifth, typical of eleventh-century monastery organum singing.

Does a purely sonic explanation explain how one gets from the physics to the semantics, from sound to sense? How can what begins as a disturbance in air come to “disturb,” or for that matter, to comfort, the human soul? Whence comes the marvelous ability of music to affect us? And is the way that music affects us its meaning? Jean-Jacques Rousseau appeals to “nature” in a wholly different manner.[8] In his view, music and speech have a common origin as the language of passion of primitive humans: “In the beginning was the song.”

Bernstein dismisses the suggestion that the meaning of music is the feeling, primitive or sophisticated, that we associate with it. No; music, says Bernstein, “has intrinsic meanings of its own, which are not to be confused with specific feelings or moods, and certainly not with pictorial impressions or stories.”[9]

Music is “sonorous forms in motion,”[10] and its meaning has to do with the intrinsic grammatical laws that govern the developments of its forms.[11]

Some unanswered questions

These initial reflections on certain analogies between language, music, and religion—analogies concerning their respective origins and natures—indicate that there is something to our initial query, What has Vienna to do with Jerusalem?

a. Bernstein’s question: whither music?

The unanswered question of Bernstein’s Norton Lectures—Whither music? —is about music’s future: specifically, what law or principle will come to dominate the next stage in the history of music composition, the next step in the development or evolution of the language of music?[12] Bernstein tells the history of Western music as the story of two opposing forces: the centripetal or diatonal force, which acts like harmonic gravity and keeps music related to the tonic or home key; and the centrifugal or chromatic, which pushes music to break out of its tonal orbit and to boldly go where no ears have gone before.

Great composers all seem able to balance these two forces: discipline and desire, form and freedom, reason and passion—the “classical” and “romantic” impulses respectively Speaking very roughly: the classical gives pride of place to the objective, to thought, to law and order—in harmony and rhythm, that is—whereas the romantic privileges the subjective, feeling, freedom, and desire. At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, however, the old alliance appeared to be coming apart. “The air was now filled with volcanic, chromatic sparks.”[13] The famous melody in the opening bars of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” for instance, alternates between C-sharp and G-natural. This particular interval, an augmented fourth, contradicts the fundamental tonic-dominant law of tonality. It is not easily discernible as an overtone; hence, it sounds “unnatural.” Interestingly, the early church fathers declared this interval forbidden, calling it diabolus in musica. Debussy’s melodic motif is, so to speak, the devil in music. Little wonder, then, that the breakdown of tonal order was felt in the twentieth century to be linked more broadly to the disintegration of the social order. In any case, it is more than coincidental that the loss of sure tonic footholds was taking place when absolutes in other areas—knowledge, morality, politics—were also slipping away.[14]

b. Ives’s question: What is the meaning of life?

Bernstein took the title for his Norton Lectures from a piece by Charles Ives, composed yet again in the musically significant year of 1908. Ives wrote “The Unanswered Question” for string quartet, trumpet, and flutes. In his foreword to the piece, Ives describes his idea: “The strings play pianissimo throughout with no change in tempo. They are to represent ‘The Silence of the Druids—Who know, see, and hear nothing.’ The trumpet intones ‘The perennial question of existence’… But the hunt for the ‘Invisible Answer’ is undertaken by the flutes and other human beings.”[15] What for Bernstein is a purely musical question is for Ives blatantly metaphysical: not “What will happen to music in our century?” but “What will happen to humanity?” The trumpet’s unanswered question is posed in a nontonal phrase; the flutes’ search for an answer becomes increasingly hectic and ambiguous. The piece ends with the flutes sounding like gibberish, recalling the sentiment expressed by Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Life’s but…, a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.[16]

c. The postmodern question: Is everything artificial?

Postmodern thinkers go farther than Ives in their suspicion of life’s meaning, and farther than Bernstein in their suspicion of the meaning of music. Music illustrates what some postmoderns have been saying about language in general: that it is never referential, but always and only differential. In other words, there is nothing outside language or music to which the signs or sounds correspond. Postmoderns would therefore agree with Bernstein that the meaning of music is not to be found in its ability to “represent” the external world or to “express” the inner world of human subjectivity. However, these same postmoderns would vehemently disagree with Bernstein’s attempt to argue that some differences are more “natural” than others.

Postmodern thinkers would especially challenge Bernstein’s contention to have discovered certain “universal” intervals. If tonality is indeed “a hierarchical arrangement of the triads based on the natural … overtones,”[17] then post-moderns would surely be against it, for their point is that all hierarchies are really arbitrary social constructions, not natural givens. This would presumably apply to the tonic-dominant relationship that dominates Western tonal music, too. The postmodern question amounts to this: is not every pattern of organized sound as artificial and arbitrary as another? Are not all our judgments about the truth, goodness, and beauty of music merely a reflex of the cultural will-to-power? And is not music’s power to move us merely an effect of its unique rhetoric?[18]

d. The theological question: Is music true?

To these questions, I wish to add two more. First, why music? Why does it exist? What need does it meet? Second, can we deem music “true,” and if so, what would this mean? Does music correspond to something real, and if so, to what? I recognize that these questions are not necessarily welcome by professional musicians. Some hold that music needs no justification; that we enjoy making and listening to music is enough. I also agree with George Steiner that “When it speaks of music, language is lame.”[19] So be it. Given their subject matter—the reality and activity of the God of Jesus Christ—theologians are accustomed to such verbal and conceptual limping. Yet to stammer about important issues is an aspect of the theologian’s mandate: to search, from the perspective of Christian faith, for understanding about the meaning of life and the issues of life. Is there some basis for the hope, the joy, the comfort, the faith, not to mention the protest and the despair, that music connotes and communicates? We begin with a survey of the stammering of three eminent theologians on the matter of the meaning of music.

II. Three Preliminary Theological Answers

1. Augustine’s De Musica: Pythagoras and “the science of well-measured motion”

St. Augustine wrote the six books that comprise his De Musica around the year 390. They represent only a fragment of a projected series on the liberal arts. In fact, the six books are only a fraction of a larger treatise on music. In Augustine’s words, they pertain only “to that part called Rhythm.”[20]

Augustine was familiar with Pythagorean harmonics, that is, with the laws concerning string lengths and frequencies. The ancient Greeks knew that two strings of equal thickness, when they are in length in the ratio of 2:3, will sound a musical interval that is a perfect fifth apart. From a Pythagorean perspective, harmony is less about sounds than it is about the ratios between whole numbers.

With these Pythagorean presuppositions firmly in hand, Augustine launches into a reflection on music that bears the indelible marks of his own genius. He first considers rhythm, which involves not only numeric ratios, but the additional factors of time and motion too. He proceeds to define music, in a way that strikes our modern ears as somewhat odd, as “the science of measuring well.” What music measures, Augustine reasons, is not only space (the length of strings), but time. Even today; musical scores are made up of “measures” with notes that denote relative “lengths” of time (e.g., “quarter, … half,” and “sixteenth” notes). Whereas arithmetic is the science of numbers in themselves, geometry measures inert spaces, and astronomy measures the movements of heavenly bodies. What does music measure? Music, says Augustine, measures relationships between the soul and the body, as well as proportions within the soul itself. The modern reader may here be tempted to give up on Augustine’s train of thought. How could music possibly measure the soul, assuming (as many moderns do not) that there is a soul?

Given his worldview, Augustine’s argument makes sense, and may have something to say even to those living more than a millennium later. As we have seen, music for Augustine is the science of moving well. This insight contains, in seminal form, the insight that led Kant, in the first modern philosophical treatment of aesthetics, to define beauty in terms of “right proportions” and “purposivity without purpose.”[21] For when Augustine speaks of “moving well” he means moving in such a way that the movement is desired for itself. Well-measured motion is a matter of right proportions, and harmony is the science of well-proportioned sonic motion.

Crucially for Augustine, it is the mind that perceives the numeric order of the motion. He is quite clear about this: music does not imitate a harmony it finds in the order of things so much as an order it finds in the realm of reason. This is why for him music is related to the soul, and not just to the body What we really appreciate in music is an eternal order—heavenly ratios—that come to expression in time. Music thus becomes the symbol of an eternal numeric order—an eminently rational order, the Logos!—that pervades the universe. All beauty and proportion we experience on earth comes from “the highest and eternal rule of numbers,”[22] that is, from the mind of God. The very alteration of sound and silence in music is for Augustine a symbol of creation ex nihilo: the coming into being of something from nothing. Music therefore speaks to Augustine of God “the author of all fittingness and agreement.”[23]

2. Schweitzer’s Bach: music as the ministry of the Word

Bach’s music has been called the artistic expression of the German Reformation.[24] Another scholar states that Bach’s cantatas “are not intended to be works of music or art on their own, but to carry on, by their own means, the work of Luther, the preaching of the word and of nothing but the word.”[25]

According to Albert Schweitzer, Bach illustrated theological ideas in music. Schweitzer was not only a medical doctor and New Testament scholar, but an expert in Bach’s organ music. His fascinating two-volume study of Bach’s musical language is filled with examples. In the B-minor Mass, Christ’s descent into hell is depicted by the low register of the voices, and the hope of resurrection by a modulation into the key of G major. In the same work, Bach sets the Nicene creed to music. The words of the Credo “and in one God” are sung as a soprano and alto duet. Schweitzer writes: “He knew what the Greek fathers had in their minds when they took such pains to prove the identity of Christ with God and yet assert an independence of persons … [Bach] makes both singers sing the same notes, but in such a way that it does not amount to the same thing; the voices follow each other in strict canonic imitation; the one proceeds out of the other just as Christ proceeds out of God … Bach thus proves that the dogma can be expressed much more clearly and satisfactorily in music than in verbal formulae.”[26]

According to Schweitzer, Bach was actually able to symbolize no less than the doctrine of the Trinity through his music. His St. Anne’s Fugue is written in three flats, it has three sections and three “subjects.” Even more telling, the first subject is combined contrapuntally with the other two, demonstrating, perhaps more effectively than do the formulas of theologians, how the Son and Spirit “proceed” from the Father: three subjects in one fugue; three persons in one nature.

More recently, Jaroslav Pelikan, formerly Professor of Church History at Yale University, has pointed out the centrality of the doctrine of atonement in Bach’s music, arguing that Bach’s Passions contribute to the history of the doctrine. Indeed, Bach’s music vaguely anticipates redaction criticism, a method for interpreting the Gospels that attends to the different slant of the Gospels and which was to flourish in the mid-twentieth century. For instance, while the St. Matthew Passion is “the most powerful musical vindication ever composed” in support of Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the atonement, the St. John’s Passion emphasizes the theme of “Christus Victor.”[27]

While Bach’s music has been and continues to be an aid to Christian faith and worship, the accounts of his theological significance by Schweitzer and Pelikan fall somewhat short. Though they make a convincing case that Bach’s music reinforces the meaning of the words and depicts theological ideas by “picturing” them, as it were, they do not make the case that serious music has something intrinsic to do with theology.

3. Barth’s Mozart: voicing creation’s praise

Perhaps no theologian has ever been associated with a composer as Karl Barth has with Mozart. Barth once remarked, “If I ever get to heaven, I shall first ask after Mozart, and only then after Augustine and Thomas, Luther and Calvin and Schleiermacher.”[28] While one can understand Pelikan, himself formerly a Lutheran, admiring Bach, the motives for Karl Barth’s (a Swiss Reformed theologian) obsession for Mozart—a Mason more inclined to natural than revealed religion —is harder to understand, at least initially.

“Free objectivity”

Barth objected to Bach’s all too obvious “desire to preach” and to Beethoven’s self-absorption and “personal confession.”[29] Mozart, by contrast, composed absolute, non-autobiographical music, “which for the true Christian is not mere entertainment, enjoyment or edification but food and drink; music full of comfort and counsel for his needs.”[30]

In 1956, the bicentenary of Mozart’s birth, Barth bought a number of new records and wrote a number of commemorative articles. He also gave a speech that was broadcast live entitled “Mozart’s freedom.”[31] In this lecture Barth observes that though the music obviously partakes of the eighteenth century, it is not really about Mozart: “The subjective is never his theme.”[32] Mozart’s music is as far removed as it can be from Barth’s liberal antagonist, the theologian of religious piety, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the idea that music (and theology) is the expression (or reflection upon) certain elevated feelings. What Barth admires in Mozart is best viewed in light of the concept that Barth himself uses to describe the greatness in Mozart’s music: “free objectivity.” On the one hand, Mozart submits to certain inexorable musical laws. His symphonies—extended sonorous forms in motion——display a kind of liquid logic. Yet alongside this feeling of necessity or inevitability, where every note has its objective place, Barth discerns freedom and creativity as well. Mozart’s well-measured motion is at once obedient to “Frau Musica” and joyfully free.[33] The greatness of Mozart’s music is that “he never becomes truly tragic. He plays and does not cease to play,” though he is aware of human finitude and death.[34]

The goodness of the created order

There is another dimension, even more surprising, of Barth’s appreciation for Mozart. It comes in an excursus in Church Dogmatics III/3 in the context of a discussion concerning finitude and fallenness, or to use Barth’s terminology, the “shadow side” of creation and “nothingness.” For Barth, the perfect musician “is the one who…, is best able to hear not merely the voice of his own heart but what all creation is trying to say” and who then causes it to be heard by others,[35] Mozart knew something about creation in its total goodness, says Barth, “that neither the real fathers of the Church nor our Reformers, neither the orthodox nor Liberals, neither the exponents of natural theology…, and certainly not the Existentialists, nor indeed any other great musicians before and after him, either know or can express and maintain as he did. In this respect he was pure in heart…”[36] What did Mozart know? He knew that creation was finite, and hence subject to certain limitations or “negativities,” yet at the same time he could affirm creation as good. Mozart’s music responds to the problem of evil at least this far, in that he affirms created finitude as essentially good rather than fallen. Mozart “heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness.”[37] Creation, even in its finitude, harmoniously praises God. And Mozart’s music communicates something about divine providence more successfully, thinks Barth, than any other artist, theologian, or philosopher.

III. What Does Music Communicate?

Our brief survey of three theologians has produced a variety of responses to the question of the meaning of music. We turn now to a prior question: does music communicate, and if so, what does music communicate? Can music communicate certain truths about the world, or truths of general revelation? Or does music express what is merely human only? Can music ever convey the truths of special revelation and so express not only the sentiment of human faith but faith’s very substance?

1. Cosmology: music as general revelation

When the ancient Greeks spoke of the “music of the spheres,” they were observing a certain correspondence between the numerical order displayed by planetary motions and the order in musical sounds and rhythms.[38] Contemporary theologians continue to find resources for theology in music, though few would go so far as to say that music represents proof, or an argument from harmonic design, for God’s existence.

Some theologians have recently reclaimed Augustine’s insights into music and are using them as antidotes against postmodern nihilism. In the first instance, Augustine reminds us that time, as one of God’s creations, is good. Second, music challenges the assumption that “all is [merely] flux.” We have already seen how Augustine conceives of music as enabling the soul to delight not only in temporal harmonies but in the timeless order of rational numbers as well. The further point to make, however, is that the temporal order also participates in some sense in the order of eternity

Augustine pointed out that when we sing a melody, we are aware both of the notes we have just sung and of the notes we are about to sing. The soul is thus “stretched” between past and future, yet this stretching is not a pulling apart so much as an interrelating. Singing, and experiencing music in general, therefore makes possible a way of thinking about change in terms other than a series of meaningless changes. Music shows that development through time—becoming —is not a vice, but a perfection of creation.[39] Music helps us to see temporality as a good gift, as an integral aspect of the created order, no mean feat in an age that tends to equate the march of time with meaninglessness and mortality

Catherine Pickstock’s agenda is even more ambitious; she appeals to Augustine as a theologico-musical key to an ontology, psychology, and politics that responds to a postmodern musical ontology which sees music as evidence of an underlying metaphysical nihilism.[40] A ratio is simply a rationally ordered relation. As such, it lends itself to a number of applications from theology (the Creator-creature relation) to politics (the relation of individuals in the social order). Every creature seeks to be itself, to occupy its proper position in time and space. Or, as Pickstock puts it: “Every creature is a specific rhythm.”[41] Augustine comments at the end of De Musica that salvation consists in each creature’s being in its own proper place and time.[42]

By contrast, one of Derrida’s disciples, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sees in music evidence of a postmodern ontology of differance, in which there are relations (differences) between things, but no natural or normative order,[43] Well-measured motion here gives way to manipulated motion. Jacques Attali, another postmodern thinker, defines music as “mitigated” noise.[44] This definition implies that noise is ontologically prior to music. Music is therefore a “violence” that imposes order on a reality that is essentially chaotic. As Pickstock notes, however, if there is no cosmic harmony, then every attempt at social harmony will likewise be seen as a violent imposition of form. The point of both music and politics, then, would be to exclude certain arbitrarily unwanted noises. Augustine, by contrast, sees musical harmonies as analogically participating in an ultimate reality that is essentially harmonious: the life of the triune God. Music is not mitigated noise, but rather a sharing in an eternal rhythm. In Pickstock’s words: “Neither a pure flow nor pure present moments make any coherent sense. And yet in music we hear this impossible reconciliation [flux plus order]. To believe the evidence of our ears is therefore to deny nihilism.”[45] According to this Augustinian tradition of theomusicology, therefore, melody and rhythm are vital elements in the Christian worldview, “clues to the meaning of the universe.”[46]

2. Anthropology: music as communicative act

Whereas the ancients tended to see music as connected to cosmology, most moderns are more likely to place music under the category of anthropology. This is another implication of the philosopher Kant’s famous “turn to the subject,” according to which the products of human consciousness tell us as much, if not more, about human beings than they do about things in the world. Claude Levi-Strauss, for instance, declares that “the invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.”[47] One could also mention Rudolf Bultmann, the epitome of the modern theologian, in this connection. For Bultmann, what we have in the New Testament is an expression of human subjectivity. Theology, he says, is really about anthropology; and faith is the expression of human self-understanding. Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” expresses a similar thought.

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds 
On my spirit make a music, too. 
Music is feeling, then, not sound.

This quotation returns us to the question of what music communicates. On the one hand, there are those who believe, with Beethoven, that “Music is a higher revelation than philosophy”[48] At the other extreme are those who believe that what Sir Philip Sidney once said about poetry is also true of music, namely, that “It nothing affirmeth.” In this essay, I intend to occupy a more moderate middle position: music, in both its composition and performance, is a form of human communicative action.[49]

The “‘world” of the work: beyond program music

To begin with the simpler thesis: musicians communicate. The proof: judges of music competitions, when asked why they chose the winner, invariably respond by saying that one performer succeeded in “communicating” the music to the audience better than the others. To be precise, what gets communicated in and through performance is both the score and something of the musician’s self.

Prior to the communicative act of the performer, however, lies the communicative act of the composed. For the work itself, and not only its actualization in particular performances, is a “communicative act” that embodies and projects something of a composer’s, and his age’s, sense of the world and of the place of human beings in the world.[50] To put it another way, the musical composition is a kind of text, complete with the musical equivalent of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and genres.[51] The musical composition is, to borrow from Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of texts, a kind of “discourse fixed by writing.”[52] Most crucially, musical compositions have, like texts, form and content. A musical composition is a structured work. According to Ricoeur, interpretation is that movement of understanding which follows a text from what it says to what it is about, from sense to reference. At this point, the analogy between the musical composition and the text would seem to break down, for many would deny that music is “about” anything. Such a conclusion may be prematurely hasty, however. Gustav Mahler, for instance, commented that each of his symphonies was to be “a world.”[53] Could it be that the musical work, like its literary counterpart, projects a “world of the text”?

Here I must say a word about “program” music. Program music is instrumental music that is associated with non-musical ideas or events. Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss all provided verbal “programs” or explanatory notes that stood in an analogous relation to the music. For example, Strauss wrote a symphonic poem to Nietzsche’s “program,” “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Consider also Wagner’s repeated use of “leitmotifs” in his operas. Wagner’s leitmotifs —brief snatches of melody or harmony—come to be associated with particular persons, things, or ideas. Usually the association is established by sounding the leitmotif at the first appearance or mention of the object of reference. The leitmotif is more than a label. As Donald Jay Grout, an historian of music, explains, “it accumulates significance as it recurs in new contexts; it may serve to recall the thought of its object in situations where the object itself is not present; it may be varied, developed, or transformed in accord with the development of the plot; similarity of motifs may suggest an underlying connection between the objects to which they refer.”[54] Such intertextuality is a particularly clear example of music trying to be “communicative.” Program music, then, is an example of explicit “world-making.”

Yet even non-programmatic music communicates, at least implicitly, a “sense of the world.” Charles Rosen notes that there is a general style of an age (e.g., the classical style), before there is a specific style of an individual. So, while Mozart was clearly a genius who altered the musical conventions of his day, his music nevertheless is a witness to the world in which he lived. Mozart’s music conjures up and conveys something of Mozart’s time and culture, something of Mozart’s world. Now it may be objected that instrumental music does not make statements; how then could it be said to “affirm something,” much less to project a world?

“Mood” music: being-attuned-to-the-world

In reply to the objection stated above, let us pursue the following hypothesis: What music communicates is one’s sense, conditioned but not determined by one’s time and culture, of what it is “to be in the world.” Being-in-the-world involves both a grasp of one’s environment and of oneself, a grasp of one’s place in the world and of one’s possibilities. What music conveys, then, is not so much a message as it is a mood. Interestingly enough, “mood” is the term used by Martin Heidegger, the twentieth-century existentialist philosopher, to speak of a person’s sense of being-in-the-world. In fact, the German for “mood” (die Stimmung) originally referred to the tuning of a musical instrument, which may be why Heidegger also speaks of “being attuned” (Gestimmtsein).[55] According to Heidegger, a mood makes manifest “how one is.” Mood is a key category for existentialist philosophy inasmuch as it seeks to make explicit the understanding of human existence that is implicit in self-understanding. One need not be an existentialist, however, to see a connection between the “mood of the work” and the “world of the text.” Mood includes one’s sense of self, one’s sense of the world, and the relation between them (the “tuning”). Insofar as music always conveys some sense of being-in-the-world, then we might say that all great music is “mood” music.[56]

3. Theology: music and the wager on transcendence

To this point, I have argued that music reveals something about created finitude and communicates something about an individual’s, and an age’s, self-understanding. Can we go further? Might music be more than an echo of creation, more than self-expression or self-projection? Thomas Carlyle likens music to “a kind of unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite.”[57] Hans Kang says that in the experience of Mozart’s music, he can “trace, feel and experience the presence of a deepest depth or a highest height.”[58] Can music convey truths about God? It was Calvin who declared that there is no real knowledge of self without knowledge of God. Music would indeed be theological if it communicated something about God, the world, and ourselves.

We have seen that, for some postmoderns, music is but the mitigation of noise, an imposition of the human will upon an otherwise chaotic flux. It is hard to offer proof that the postmoderns are wrong. But one can challenge their presuppositions. In so doing, I believe that we shall attain a richer appreciation and understanding of music, as well as a vital clue concerning the relation of theology to the arts.

According to Kant, religion is the answer to his famous third question, “What may I hope?”[59] Yet Kant approached the question of hope via an examination of aesthetics. Why? Because art enables us to think what is beyond our ability to prove. Art thus becomes a necessary condition for the very possibility of hope. It is perhaps against this background that George Steiner encourages people today to make a “wager on transcendence.” We do so, he says, each time we experience a work of art, because what we ultimately experience in the work of art is not ourselves but something beyond: something “other” than our own feelings or ideas. We are drawn out of ourselves into the world of the work.[60] What we encounter in a work of art is a meaningful form, be it visual, verbal, or sonorous, that communicates a kind of promise, project, or proposition—a “real presence,” to use Steiner’s term—that calls for response and has the potential to affect us.

While it is not entirely clear what transcendence means for Steiner, he nevertheless leaves us in no doubt that he believes that, in the final analysis, our experience of meaningful form must be underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence: “The ascription of beauty to truth and to meaning is either a rhetorical flourish, or it is a piece of theology. It is a theology…, which underwrites the presumption of creativity, or signification in our encounters with text, with music, with art.”[61] It is above all in music that we discern “intimations of a source and destination somehow outside the range of man.”[62] At this point, let us join with Steiner and make a wager on classical music, a wager made up of three parts: first, that it communicates; second, that some of what it communicates is true; and third, that some of its truth partakes not of the order of nature, but of grace. As we shall see, Bernstein’s naturalistic explanation ultimately falls short; for he does not adequately explain how our experience of artistic forms can be transforming.[63]

IV. Johannes Brahms: Between Romance and Redemption

1. Romance and Romanticism: Sehnsucht

Probably no musical style has more often been linked with theology than the Romantic. Whereas tonal simplicity, rhythmic clarity, tonal form, and objective order were most important in the Classical period, the Romantics focused on melodic complexity, tonal ambiguity, rhythmic subtleties, and subjective expression.[64] The Romantic style was more suited to their aim of taking human experience to the limit in contemplating love and death. Composers of the Classical era admired restraint and clarity; the Romantics preferred color and passion. The opinion of E. T. A. Hoffmann, a nineteenth-century music critic, was widely shared at the time: “[Music] is the most romantic of all the arts…, for its sole subject is the infinite… [M] usic discloses to man an unknown realm…, a world in which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.”[65]

Perhaps the best single concept to express what Hoffman took to be the essence of Romanticism is the German term Sehnsucht: an intense longing or yearning. This is also the term C. S. Lewis employs when speaking of his own spiritual pilgrimage, and his periodic inklings of joy One could also associate Sehnsucht with Augustine’s maxim: “The heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee,” except that for the Romantics, restless yearning more or less becomes an end in itself. Romantic music both awakens and expresses this yearning or desire—groanings that cannot adequately be uttered verbally[66] Probably the most famous musical example of such intoxication with desire comes from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” an operatic paean to the Romantic ideal of being united with one’s lover in death. The “mood” conveyed by this music, especially by the famous “Tristan chord,” is that of hopeless yearning.[67] Wagner is able to suggest, through a series of complex chromatic harmonies and key shifts, a state of ecstasy that is at once sensuous and spiritual: the Liebestod or “love death,” that sense of surrendering one’s finite existence for the sake of something infinite.

In late Romanticism, Western music appears to be on the brink of a near total victory of the centrifugal (chromatic) over the centripetal (tonal) force. Bernstein regards Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony, again composed in the musically significant year of 1908, as summing up the whole story of Austro-Germanic music. Mahler stood in the symphonic line that had begun with Haydn and Mozart, a tradition that had reached its end. The final movement of that symphony, according to Bernstein, declares that “ours is a century of death, and Mahler its musical prophet.”[68] To be precise, Mahler saw three kinds of death: his own death; the death of tonality, which for him (as for Brahms) meant the death of music itself; and third, the death of society that would be sure to follow the end of faith. While it may be possible to be romantic about love and death, it is harder to muster any yearning for death shorn of love. Yet according to Bernstein, this is what Mahler’s music foretells: the twentieth century as an age of death.[69]

For Bernstein, the unanswered question concerning twentieth-century music is about which force would triumph: Schoenberg and nontonality, or Stravinsky and ambiguity without the abandonment of tonality? Yet this intramural debate within music is simply a microcosm of the larger struggle for the soul of Western culture. The crisis in Western music, and aesthetics, is merely the aural symptom of deeper spiritual and intellectual problems.

At first blush, there seems little to connect, say, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Yet is it really so far-fetched to draw a connection between the loss of tonality in twentieth-century music and the postmodern critique of absolutes? For what is the critique of logocentricity if not an attack on the very idea of “centers,” conceptual or tonal, that serve as the touchstone for dichotomies such as harmonic/non-harmonic, true/false, good/bad, straight/ gay? Derrida would no doubt reject Bernstein’s talk of a “universal” grammar of music and of its “natural” meaning. From a postmodern perspective, Bern-stein commits the classic logocentric mistake of looking for some stable point outside language, outside music—in phusis—that provides a stable reference point, a means for wringing order from the flux. Tonality, I imagine Derrida might say, is simply another vestige of “white mythology,” that powerful ethnocentrism by which white male Western figures impose their cultural forms on everyone else under the pretence of their being universal.[70]

Long before postmodernity was even a twinkle in the philosopher’s eye, John Calvin worried that music, if pursued independently of Christian faith, might degenerate into sheer eros: the desire for desire rather than the desire for God. Calvin’s main principle for music, as for other good gifts of creation, is that it should be used for the end which God originally intended.[71] What is the proper end of music-making? Calvin’s answer comes in his commentary on Gen 4:20: “But music by its very nature is adapted to rouse our devotion to God and to aid the well-being of man.”[72] Apart from faith, however, music represents a pure yet empty pursuit of vain imaginings. Yet this is precisely what we have in post-modernity: desire with no destination; eros without end.

2. Brahms: the consolation of piano key

What has Vienna to do with Jerusalem? At this point, it will be helpful to turn from abstractions to a concrete case study Without entering into a debate with Bernstein over who was the greater musical prophet, Brahms or Mahler (I tend to think that Mahler is to Brahms as Elisha was to Elijah), I have chosen Johannes Brahms. The ambiguity in his music parallels the most fascinating ambiguity of all, namely, that of the human spirit, stretched as it is between hope and despair, between mourning and dancing. Brahms once said: “When I feel the urge to compose, I begin by appealing directly to my Maker, and I first ask him the three most important questions pertaining to our life here in this world—whence, wherefore, whither.”[73] Brahms asked the right preliminary questions.

“St. Johannes’” loves, labors, loss

Born in Hamburg, Brahms made Vienna his home from his thirties onwards, earning a living doing freelance conducting and performing but reserving his best energies for his composing. An early music teacher says that he recognized in the young Brahms “a priest of art, who would preach in new accents what was sublime, true, and eternally incorruptible in art.”[74] His youth was difficult. He came from a poor family and as a teenager had to play dance music through the night at a local brothel. As a biographer puts it: “It had not been all polkas and poetry”[75] Yet Brahms would put it all into his music, and somehow redeem it.

Brahms met the Schumanns, Robert and Clara, while in his twenties. They were both so impressed with his compositions for piano that Robert published an article introducing him to the world as the “messiah” of music. Richard Wagner and his cohort began referring to Brahms sarcastically as “St. Johannes,” and this probably was the more fitting epithet. Brahms called himself “a vagabond in the wilderness of the world.” Shortly after Brahms met the Schumanns, Robert fell prey to a mental disorder. Brahms, attempting to bolster Clara’s spirits, ended up falling in love with her. After Robert died, however, Brahms decided not to marry her, but to love her from afar. Like Kierkegaard, his vocation followed from his decision not to marry As a biographer puts it: “He was beginning to replace the actuality of Clara with longing for her.”[76]

This brief biographical sketch hints at what makes Brahms’s music uniquely his own. How is it that we recognize a symphony as Brahms’s as surely as if we saw his signature? It is difficult to answer in words. A music critic who was a contemporary of Brahms was probably on the right track when he observed that Brahms “understands how to be Classic and Romantic, ideal and real … I believe he is appointed to blend both these eternal oppositions in art.”[77] It also has something to do with how he integrated sorrow and joy, with how he learned to live with yearning rather than fulfillment.

Brahms’s music sums up what for Pascal is the riddle of all humanity: the paradox of greatness and miser, the uniting of the sublime and the sordid in the human creature. Brahms’s later compositions balance Apollo and Dionysius (viz., reason and passion), achieving an equilibrium that would be lost in Nietzsche, as in postmodernity. Indeed, Brahms despised the music of Wagner because he believed it indulged in sentiment and subjectivity without the appropriate restraints of objective form. In Wagner, Brahms thought he saw the signs of the end-times: the end of tonality, perhaps the end of decency as well. Wagner represented unregulated freedom and undisciplined subjectivity; his music was, in Brahms’s words, a “swindle.”[78] Brahms had an ear, it would appear, for truth; ever the weeping prophet, he was not afraid to root out musical sophistry.

The late piano composition Op. 116–118: lullabies of the weeping prophet

Brahms once wrote to Clara Schumann that only with the piano did he feel fully at home. Robert Schumann wrote that Brahms “transformed the piano into an orchestra of wailing and jubilant voices.”[79] The piano compositions are characterized by their fullness of sound, by broken chords, by cross-rhythms, and by harmonic richness. The phonology may be Romantic, but the syntax is Classical. Brahms cared about the traditional forms; even the shortest pieces display a compelling structural integrity.[80] Accordingly, we may regard Brahms’s piano music, especially the twenty pieces that form his Opuses 116–119, as a “summa musicalia”: a summary of everything Brahms had learned as a composer. These piano pieces, composed or completed in 1892, the year of his sixtieth birthday, represent the epitome of Brahms’s mature work.[81]

These pieces express Brahms’s unanswered questions: they’re all about Brahms trying to find his way, about music trying to find its way, about humanity trying to find its way The Ballade in G-minor from Op. 118 reflects the greatness and misery of the human condition. There is an impetuous youth, on the move, searching, followed by a calmer middle section interrupted by a midlife crisis when the theme from section A briefly reappears, hopelessly lost, in the key of D-sharp minor. The middle section changes to a major key (B major) and contains supremely lyrical and luxuriously harmonic passages, so much so that the definition of music as “sonorous forms in motion” becomes compelling. It is a miniature essay on the theme “from mourning to dancing.” As such, it serves as something of a proof-text for Nietzsche’s observation that Brahms is “the musician of the unsatisfied.”[82]

What is arguably Brahms’s most recognizable melodic legacy, however, is known as “Brahms’s lullaby.”[83] The purpose of a lullaby is to soothe to sleep, to bring about a certain kind of peace. Peace was something that Brahms sought, but it proved elusive. Interestingly, Brahms called the three pieces that comprise Op. 117 “cradle-songs of my sufferings” (“Wiegenlieder meiner Schmerzen”). Brahms added to the first of these pieces an inscription from a Scottish lullaby “Sleep softly my child.” One might therefore say that Brahms’s Op. 1 17 performs a consolatory communicative act. To console is to provide comfort in the midst of grief or disappointment. It is a matter of acknowledging the negativities of existence yet transforming them, thus restoring a sense of the world’s goodness. Indeed, Brahms intended that these piano pieces be used to console Clara Schumann after the death of her husband.

Brahms is surely on strong biblical grounds. Scripture records music being used both to celebrate and to console. Israel celebrated David’s defeat of Goliath “with timbrels, with songs of joy, and with instruments of music” (1 Sam 18:6).[84] David is associated with music earlier in the same book, when he plays the lyre in order to calm King Saul’s troubled spirit (1 Sam 16:23). Through David’s music, spiritual negativity is transformed into spiritual peace. Of course, David had to exercise pastoral care in his selection of music; a triumphal march does not cure depression, but mocks it.

What does Vienna have to do with Jerusalem? What does Brahms have to do with Boethius, the fifth-century Christian thinker whose classic work, The Consolation of Philosophy, was written while he languished in prison as a defense of providence? Just this: both the Op. 117 and The Consolation of Philosophy share a similar communicative intent. Boethius’s work, a dialogue between the author and Lady Philosophy, concerns the problem of “unjust suffering. So does Brahms’s. Brahms and Boethius speak for all those who, like Job, cry out, “How long, O Lord?” Curiously, what consolation Boethius offers is not drawn from Scripture; he makes no reference to the Bible. His treatise ultimately partakes more of Athens than of Jerusalem.[85] Dame Philosophy asks whether the universe is governed by reason, or by chance. Which principle rules the music of the spheres: harmony and tonality or chromaticism and “différance”? Boethius’s answer is that philosophy helps us calmly to accept the rule of nature. Consolation comes in seeing things from the perspective of eternity. Cultivating that perspective is the task of philosophy.

The question that theology poses to this philosophy—and to music—concerns its right to console.[86] Is there any basis in reality for these musical effects? If not, then the postmoderns are right, and the consolation of music—like philosophy!—is only an effect of rhetoric. The stakes are high, and concern the right of aesthetics to be used for apologetics. Is an appeal to beauty simultaneously an appeal to truth?

Brahms is the Jeremiah of Western music: its weeping prophet. From his apartment facing Vienna’s Karlskirche, Brahms saw it all coming: the downfall of the Austrian Empire, the demise of tonally, the despair and delusions of late modern Western culture. And, as Jeremiah was a prophet to Israel in exile, so Brahms is a prophet to the human race, seemingly exiled from happiness because of the shortness of the times. Brahms is the prophet of human mortality: Robert Schumann’s, Clara Schumann’s, his mother’s, his friends’, his own. What true comfort can Brahms communicate to compensate for such loss?

V. The Gospel Between Auschwitz and Jerusalem

1. German Requiem or Gospel Resolution?

Back to Bernstein. In another series of television lectures, Bernstein spoke of the “joy” of music. Yet his preoccupation with joy did not prevent him from entitling his 1949 composition, a symphony, “The Age of Anxiety.” Like earlier musicians, Bernstein gave vent to the anxiety about his times. For Bernstein, it was anxiety about the looming cold war, as well as a more pervasive anxiety about not knowing why, nor how long, nor which way to turn.

Post-Holocaust harmony?

Johann Strauss, Jr., was just eight years Brahms’s senior, yet the gap between them was more a difference of ages than an age difference. Musically speaking, they belong to different worlds. Strauss composed music for optimists. Can we continue to waltz our way past two world wars? How can we celebrate, and more importantly what should we celebrate, in light of the events of the twentieth century? Human achievements, the glory that was Vienna?” Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things”?[87] What kind of music does one compose after two world wars, after Auschwitz? How can we make sense of anything after the violent, the technological, the entertaining, the absurd twentieth century? This is the problem for theologians no less than for composers. Strauss is charming, to be sure, but we cannot take his waltzes too seriously. They cannot be the final word; they are not true. The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann feels the same way about scholastic theology. For him, theology cannot continue after Auschwitz as if nothing has happened. The supreme being of theism, like a Strauss waltz, is a beautiful thing, but it is not, he believes, true to our age. Theology after Auschwitz must speak of the suffering, crucified God.

A good many intellectual and cultural works produced in the twentieth century have proclaimed, often quite powerfully, the anguish and anxiety of the day. Insofar as these have acknowledged the real negativities of existence, they may be deemed true, though not necessarily beautiful. After all, the human condition in its fallen state is not a pretty sight. For his part, Brahms was under no illusion about the threat of death. Many of his works confront it, sometimes explicitly so.

Brahms and “being-towards-death”

Brahms’s German Requiem was composed soon after his mother’s death in 1865. Yet it is not a conventional Latin mass for the dead so much as Brahms’s personal testament which draws on Luther’s German Bible to speak of death, mourning, and comfort. The first movement sets the words “Blessed are they that mourn.” As in his symphonies, Brahms is able to eke out a kind of triumph over, or rather through, tragedy But what kind of triumph? Not for him the “Christus Victor” theme that Bach displays in his St. John’s Passion. Curiously, Brahms left out any mention of the person and work of Jesus Christ. (While it may be possible to see, and hear, Brahms as a prophet, it is difficult in the extreme to say of him what was said of Bach, that the music exists for the sake of preaching the word. No, Brahms’s music tries to cope with death without dogma.)

Brahms composed his last work, “Four Serious Songs,” in May of 1896,just after learning of the stroke that would eventually lead to Clara Schumann’s death. Again, the words come from scriptural meditations on death. The first treats death’s inevitability: ‘All are taken to the same place; it is all made of dust and goes back to dust.” The second focuses on oppression and the oppressed. Brahms had some idea of what was to come for Vienna, and for Europe. Not only did he live through the economic crash of 1873 that weakened the Austrian Empire, but he was troubled by the antidemocratic forces that were coming to the surface in Austrian culture. Jews were beginning to be blamed for, among other things, the economic crash. Politicians began to run campaigns against the “Semitic rule of money” Brahms had once declared, “Anti-semitism is madness!” Yet it was a madness that was gripping Vienna as its culture began to disintegrate. Classical Vienna was dying too.

Brahms was probably vaguely aware of at least one of the so-called “masters of suspicion” that were calling modernity’s trust in reason into question,[88] Even if Brahms was unacquainted with Freud’s work in Vienna, which would be a crucial plank in the overthrowing of the prestige of reason and consciousness, he certainly knew Wagner’s music—“Romanticism without brakes”[89] —perhaps the musical equivalent of Freud’s exploration of the unconscious. Perhaps Brahms even heard certain fascist overtones in Wagner’s music—nationalist and anti-Semitic overtones that would eventually come together in an ardent admirer of Wagner (and Nietzsche), Adolf Hitler.[90]

The last serious song speaks of consolation without what Brahms considered the “illusion” of eternal life. The text is 1 Cor 13 and the theme is love. His biographer notes that Brahms’s love had the face of Clara Schumann, and when she died, “love would die for him, and for him then music would be no more than sounding brass.”[91] Indeed, when Clara died Brahms declared “Now I have nobody left to lose.”[92]

2. Eucatastrophe and the consolation of the gospel

The unanswered question posed by Brahms’s music (and not only by Brahms) is whether its power to console is true—rooted in reality—or false, a mere human projection. Human beings, mere mortals, need a genuine consolation, not one that is artificially sweetened. The pastoral ministry of cradle songs, if it is to be effective rather than merely soporific, must correspond to the way things are.

“Suffering tonality”

The gospel of St. Johannes is “be comforted.” His “Intermezzo in A major” Op. 1 18 shows Brahms at his most reflective, Brahms the deep thinker. It is possible to listen to this piece as a virtual essay on Sehnsucht and consolation. But why should one believe this Intermezzo, and other comforting pieces like it? Just what is the comfort for those who mourn? What is the consolation of philosophy, or piano key or for that matter, religion? Why shouldn’t we follow Nietzsche and Feuerbach and admit that all consolations are merely human projections, imaginings that eventually dwindle into vanity? No one really believes Johann Strauss’s saccharine platitudes anymore, do they?

To be sure, Brahms’s music is more “true to life,” more in touch with human joys and sorrows than, say, a Strauss waltz. Brahms is more authentic, to use Heidegger’s language.[93] Does Brahms get us any further than Heidegger’s understanding of the human as “being towards death”? To repeat: the crucial theological question about aesthetics is whether the power to console associated with the work of art (or in this case, the musical composition) has any basis in reality. One can admire the works, but can one believe in the worlds the works project? The Christian response, informed by the New Testament, must be that apart from resurrection, there is little basis for hope. Even some non-theological music critics can see that. Carl Dahlhaus, for instance, comments that in Brahms’s Requiem “a forlorn hope is made to substitute for faith.”[94] Most postmoderns have abandoned even that.

The twentieth century may well come to be known as the catastrophic century. In addition to the horrors of genocide in Europe and beyond, one could mention the “titanic” failure of technology to solve our most enduring problems, or worse, the way in which technological advances have actually complicated the project of human life on planet earth. Catastrophe is only the next-to-last word, however, for the Christian. The gospel proclaims the good news of “eucatastrophe,” a cataclysmic event with a beneficial effect: the Word become flesh. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote: “The birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of human history. The resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.”[95] The Christian message is that there is indeed consolation, though it has not come cheaply Thanks to the work of God’s long-suffering servant, the “surprise” of joy—including the poignant joy of Brahms’s “suffering tonality”—is that its tacit message is actually true.

Music become fact

Music, like rhetoric, can indeed produce various effects in its listeners. Consolation that is not grounded in the way things are is only an effect of rhetoric. My argument, however, is that the consolation offered by great music has a basis in reality—in the person and work of Jesus Christ—and for this reason, and for this reason only, may be deemed true. One may therefore apply what Tolkien said about fairy-stories to Brahms’s late piano pieces: to the extent that the world of Brahms’s works Speaks of a joy that transcends death—yes, even a “love death” (for what else is the Cross?)—they may in some way partake of, or at least express, that reality.

C. S. Lewis referred to the incarnation as “myth become fact.” We could equally well speak of “music become fact”—not sentimental or self-indulgent music, but the suffering tonality of Brahms. This is not the carefree joy of Strauss’s Vienna. This is rather joy that has been tested, and refined, by fire. “Immanuel”—God with us; God for us—is the only message that truly consoles. Because this story is true, the joy of music—indeed, Art itself—has been verified.

Brahms’s suffering tonality does not, of course, save anyone. Nor need one be a Christian in order to enjoy or to be moved by it. Nevertheless, in testifying to a consolation in the face of death, it becomes a witness, at least implicitly, not simply to the goodness of the created order (as in Mozart), but to the hope of a recreated order.[96] The light that comes from music is genuine, but it is reflected. It is not itself the light, but one of the smaller lights that bears witness to him who is the one true light of the world. To the extent that music may prepare the way for this more explicit word, perhaps Brahms’s nickname was apt after all: “St. Johannes.”

VI. Conclusion: Singing in Parables

1. The poetry of earth? Bernstein’s naturalistic credo

Bernstein entitled his sixth and final Norton Lecture “The poetry of earth.” Here we find his answer to his initial question: Where is music going? According to Bernstein, the history of music marches onward and upward—up the overtone scale, that is. Twentieth-century composers have discovered a new dissonantal freedom, but Bernstein now sees this development as an enrichment to the “phonology of tonality,” not its contradiction. For example, Stravinsky explores intervals of ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths instead of the more traditional triads and diminished sevenths. And in his “L’Histoire du Soldat,” the opening phrase passes through five different keys in as many seconds. Bernstein acknowledges the difficulty this music presents to the listener, yet his point is that such music remains rooted in “the tonal universal.” In other words, musicians still speak in tonality, though the transformative grammar has become much more complex. Music has not disintegrated into a Babel-like cacophony, after all. Bernstein’s metanarrative of musicians exploring the series of overtones accounts for polytonality too. Human creativity triumphs; music goes on. This is what he means by poetry “rooted in earth.”

In the final analysis, however, Bernstein fails to take us beyond physics. The deep structure to which he ultimately appeals is thoroughly physical: frequencies and sound waves and vibrations. When it comes to the metaphysics of music—its relation to ultimate reality—we must, sadly, place Bernstein with the naturalists, not with the theists. This is borne out by the extraordinary “Credo” with which he ends his book:

I believe that from the Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series … And I believe that no matter how serial…, or otherwise intellectualized music may be, it can always qualify as poetry as long as it is rooted in earth.[97]

Bernstein gives an indication of the faith that sustains him earlier in his book as well. In brief: he believes in the future and in creativity Though we know we shall die, we simply have to go on. “There must be something in us, and in me, that makes me want to continue.”[98] One must regretfully conclude that Bern-stein’s book lives up to its rifle. Rather than really answering the question of how and why one must go on, he leaves us with the worst form of fideism: mere believism. Returning at the end to Ives’s Unanswered Question, he writes: “I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”[99]

For Bernstein, then, the joy of music is a matter of rejoicing in the diversity that springs out of that universal “Earth.” Yet his confession of faith does not advance us beyond the realm of immanence and the religion of nature. He fails adequately to account for the joy of music. For the poetry of earth is also red in tooth and claw. Indeed, set against the backdrop of Darwin’s law—the survival of the fittest—it is blank verse whose only hope lies with that creativity that empowers the endless cycle of life and death.

2. The poetry of heaven: the God-so-loved world of the work of art

Music, the greatest good the mortals know, 
And all of heaven we have below. 

—Joseph Addison, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”

The contrast between music as Bernstein’s poetry of earth and Joseph Addison’s vision of heaven here below could not be greater. What is the nature of the relation between music and the kingdom of heaven? Obviously, music cannot be a substitute for the preaching of the Gospel, though I have argued that Brahms’s music bears indirect witness to the Gospel, to the extent that it consoles and suggests that redemption comes only through suffering. What moral for the contemporary church can we draw from our study?

There is much in contemporary culture—far too much!—that leads to the atrophy of our imaginations. Popular culture is in some measure responsible for our undernourished spirits and our emaciated souls. Our everyday world is the fiat earth of Muzak, a world of easy listening and easy living. In our dumbed-down times, Brahms’s music can act as a spiritual discipline insofar as it trains our ears, and our imaginations, to resist simplistic sentiment on the one hand and despairing cynicism on the other.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for Christian composers, as well as theologians, in the twenty-first century is to express the faith in a way that acknowledges what is right in postmodernity’s protest against Enlightenment optimism. Art and music aid the eucatastrophic imagination when they take sin and suffering seriously, but not so seriously as to lose sight of the joy of the gospel, which stands like bookends on either side of the human story. The church needs the tonic, and the discipline, of suffering tonality.

It is not simply a matter, then, of music “voicing creation’s praise,” but of music voicing the consolation of a fallen and redeemed creation. Brahms’s beloved A-B-A sonata form is a musical approximation of the biblical order of creation-fall-recreation. Human history is a work in progress; we stand as pilgrims in the development section, hoping for the “R’ to come. Yes, there is a tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” But Derrida’s notion that meaning is endlessly deferred is not the last word; resolutions in music anticipate an eschatological resolution. Music cultivates both hope and patience. Brahms’s music bespeaks a love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7).

Those who hope can speak in sonic parables. Maybe Brahms did, after all, compose “gospel” music in spite of himself. For his most cherished romantic idea—that love conquers death—is rooted in the divine poetry, not of earth but of history. Music offers authentic consolation only if God has so loved the world. Those who have ears to hear—to hear the meaning of music, the mourning of crucifixion and the Magnificat of incarnation and resurrection—let them hear!

Notes

1. Though his music is instantly recognized, Strauss typically receives only one or two lines in surveys of the history of western music.
2. Tonality is a hierarchical arrangement of musical triads (sets of three notes or pitches) based on the natural harmonics or overtones of a note. For a discussion of overtones, see below.
3. Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 263.
4. Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 630.
5. The lectures were made into a television series which later became a book. See above n. 3.
6. Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 9.
7. Ibid., 27.
8. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages (New York: E Ungar, 1967).
9. Ibid., 131. Bernstein here appears as an unwitting precursor of Derrida, for whom verbal meaning emerges from a system of linguistic differences. An analogous case could be made that music is constructed out of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic differences. One could then describe the language of music as the play not of signifiers but of “sonifiers.” For Derrida’s analysis of Rousseau’s argument that music and speech have a common origin, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 195-200.
10. So Eduard Hanslick, cited in Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 135.
11. In Bernstein’s words: “A piece of music is a constant metamorphosis of given material, involving such transformational operation as inversion, augmentation, modulation, the opposition of consonance and dissonance … the varieties of rhythm and meter, harmonic progressions … These are the meanings of music” (Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 135).
12. Other arts in the twentieth century were asking themselves a similar question: in painting, the representational objection was disappearing, dissolving into subjective impressions or sliced and diced into Cubist fractions.
13. Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 205. Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” provokes a crisis: “Is this tonality, or toying with tonality, or simply nontonality?” (233).
14. Persons familiar with worldview-ish thinking may not be surprised to learn of cultural and intellectual connections between theology, philosophy, and the arts. However, though many can see broad family resemblances between, sag the music of Haydn and Mozart, the paintings of Watteau and David, and the philosophies of Locke and Leibniz, it is challenging in the extreme to give an exact and explicit verbal articulation of just what they have in common. For one attempt to do just that, at least in survey fashion, see William Fleming, Arts and Ideas (7th ed.; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986).
15. Cited in Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 268.
16. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, scene 1.
17. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart (rev. ed.; London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 23.
18. All language is a species of rhetoric according to some postmodern thinkers. That is, there is nothing behind or outside of language that accounts for its ability to produce effects. What earlier philosophers called “truth” is for postmoderns simply an example of language at its most persuasive. Jeremy Begbie suggests that one reason theologians have not treated music seriously more often stems from a fear in musie’s capacity to manipulate emotions. See Jeremy Begbie, “Theology and the Arts: Music,” in The Modern Theologians(ed. David Ford; 2d ed.; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997), 687. For a fuller development of these points, see my Is There a Meaning in this Text?(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), esp. chap. 4.
19. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 19.
20. See Augustine, De Musica, in Writings of St. Augustine (The Fathers of the Church 2; New York: Cima, 1947).
21. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (London: Collier Macmillan, 1951). What impresses Kant about art is that it displays a purposive arrangement but does not serve any concrete practical end.
22. Augustine, De Musica, VI, xvii.
23. Ibid., VI, viii.
24. Jaroslav Pelikan notes that Luther’s own faith was rooted in “a profound awareness of the crisis of the human predicament” (Bach Among the Theologians [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986] 21). Pelikan claims that Bach was even able to preserve Luther’s notion that believers are simul justus et peccator (“simultaneously righteous and sinner”) by combining confession and celebration (22).
25. From Bach-Studien, cited in Pelikan, Bach, 26.
26. Cited in Pelikan, Bach, 47.
27. Ibid., 106.
28. Cited in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 409.
29. Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 37.
30. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), 297–98.
31. These talks have been collected and published together in Barth’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (see n. 29 above).
32. Barth, Mozart, 49.
33. It may well be that much in Barth’s theology would be illuminated by entering it through the back door of his writings on Mozart. The notion of free objectivity recalls both Barth’s insistence that divine revelation is objective and subjective, as well as the way he envisions the relation of evangelical ethics (free response) to evangelical theology (objective grace).
34. Barth, Mozart, 47.
35. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, 472.
36. Ibid., 298.
37. Ibid.
38. “For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered [planetary] motions, though they give no sound on the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony” (Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643). The philosopher Schopenhauer commented that music “exhibits itself as the metaphysical to everything physical in the world … We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music” (Cited in Steiner, Real Presences, 19).
39. See Begbie, “Theology and the Arts: Music,” 690. See also Begbie, Theology, Music and Time: The Sound of God (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). If only Heidegger had appreciated music, he would not have come to the conclusion that human being-in-time must be oriented only to death and futility.
40. I cannot do justice to Pickstock’s complex argument here. Interestingly, she contrasts the western tonal tradition not only with its dissolution in postmodernity but also with its dissolution in Eastern music. Underlying each musical style, she discerns metaphysical, psychological, and political presuppositions.
41. Catherine Pickstock, “Music: Soul, City and Cosmos After Augustine,” in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), 249.
42. Augustine, De Musica, VI, xvii.
43. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
44. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
45. Pickstock, “Music: Soul, City and Cosmos After Augustine,” 269. Pickstock goes on to suggest that to believe in music is to believe in the healing of time, and thus “sacramentally to receive the incarnation of God in time.” It remains an open question as to the extent to which a historical incarnation, and a historical death and resurrection, is necessary on this scheme.
46. This phrase comes from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Lewis is referring not to melody and rhythm, but to moral right and wrong.
47. Cited in Steiner, Real Presences, 19.
48. Cited from a letter by Beethoven to Bettina von Arnim in 1810.
49. For a fuller treatment of the concept of communicative action, see my Is There a Meaning in This Text?, chaps. 5 and 6.
50. For a critique of the idea that music has the expressive power of verbal speech acts, see Francis Watson, “Theology and Music,” SJT 51 (1998): 435-63, esp. p. 447.
51. The analogy between music and language is a loose one. Bernstein examines in some detail the exact linguistic and grammatical equivalents of musical phenomena such as notes, phrases, and movements. He concludes, however, with the thought that “It seems as if all music is made up of relative clauses … “ (Unanswered Question, 61).
52. I say a kind of discourse because, for Ricocur, oral or written discourse has both sense and reference. The controversial point concerning music is whether it refers to anything outside of itself.
53. Cited in Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music (rev. ed.; New York: Norton, 1973), 625.
54. Ibid., 613. Grout notes that about twenty leitmotifs, including “fate,” Siegfried, “redemption,” and the Rhine gold, appear in all four of Wagner’s Ring operas.
55. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 172.
56. Readers who remain unconvinced by my explication of music projecting worlds or “moods” would do well to consider Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s analysis of the philosophical significance of the work of art. See especially Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). Unfortunately, an extended comparison of the respective ontologies of the work of art and the work of music is beyond the limits of the present essay.
57. Cited in Watson, “Theology and Music,” 462 n. 35.
58. Hans Küng, Mozart: Traces of Transcendence (London: SCM, 1992), 34.
59. Kant asked and answered his first two questions, What can I know? and What ought I to do?, in his critiques of pure and practical reason, respectively.
60. Steiner speaks of “the single most intricate organization of the interactions of feelings and of meaning known to us, which is that deployed in a string quartet” (Real Presences, 196). It is also worth noting that Steiner believes that the sense of a transcendent presence in the text is ultimately grounded in theology: “It is a theology, explicit or suppressed, masked or avowed…, which underwrites the presumption of creativity; of signification in our encounters with text, with music, with art” (ibid., 216).
61. Ibid., 216.
62. Ibid., 217.
63. Francis Watson shows his impatience with this line or argumentation in this barbed question: “Why bother with Jesus and the Christian gospel when we can be instantly transported into the presence of transcendence by the simple action of putting on a CD, in the comfort of our own home?” (“Theology and Music,” 462 n. 36).
64. The terms “classical” and “romantic” are used somewhat loosely here to demarcate the musical style typical of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from that which prevailed for much of the rest of the nineteenth century. Charles Rosen helpfully defines a style as “a way of exploiting and focusing a language” (Classical Style, 20). Classical and Romantic composers shared many of the same phonics, but the syntax and semantics, to use Bernstein’s terms, were typically distinct. Rosen, for instance, speaks of “the classical conviction that the simplest tonal relationships can alone provide the subject matter of music” (Classical Style, 459).
65. Cited in Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), 42. E. T. A. Hoffmann was, ironically enough, speaking of Beethoven, whom Rosen considers a classical composer. In 1813, the year of Hoffman’s opinion, however, the terms “classical” and “romantic” had not come to represent contrasting musical styles.
66. C. S. Lewis clarifies what Charles Williams meant by calling himself a “romantic theologian”: “[this term] does not mean one who is romantic about theology but one who is theological about romance” (“Preface” to C. S. Lewis, ed., Essays Presented to Charles Williams [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966], vi).
67. Bernstein identifies Wagner’s Tristan as “the turning point after which music could never be the same” (Unanswered Question, 231). In examining the opening bars that provide the backdrop for the Tristan chord, Bernstein asks: “Is this tonality, or toying with tonality, or simply nontonality?” (233). One suspects that if Bernstein had known of the language of deconstruction, he may have been tempted to use it.
68. Ibid., 313.
69. Prophets are often without honor in their own land; Mahler’s music was banned for years in Vienna by the Nazis.
70. See Derrida, “White Mythology,” New Literary History 5 (1974): 5-74.
71. Calvin, Institutes, III.x.2.
72. Joseph Haroutunian, ed., Calvin: Commentaries (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958), 355.
73. Cited in Patrick Kavanaugh, The Music of Angels (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999), 114.
74. Cited in Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 25.
75. Ibid., 29.
76. Ibid., 146.
77. Adolf Schubring, cited in ibid., 234.
78. Ibid., 68.
79. Cited in ibid., 84.
80. Everything develops from the main idea; he is a master of transforming themes, or of what Schoenberg calls “developing variation.”
81. The oral version of this paper, a lecture-recital, included performances of the Ballade in G minor (Op. 118) and the Intermezzo in A major (Op. 118).
82. Cited in Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 122.
83. The popular tune actually comes from a Waltz from Op. 39.
84. I believe it to be highly significant that the celebration had a basis in history. I shall return to this below with the notion of “eucatastrophe.”
85. There is something of a parallel here with Brahms, who in his “German Requiem” cites Scriptures, but omits any mention of Jesus Christ. Brahms and Boethius are “religious” without being specifically Christian. My argument below is that this lack of historical concreteness entails an inadequate grounding for the hope and consolation that music provides.
86. Francis Watson also poses this theological question in his “Theology and Music,” 448.
87. Algernon Swinburne’s “Hymn of Man.”
88. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Freud was 40 the year Brahms died, though his most celebrated work lay ahead of him. See Swafford, Johannes Brahms, 629.
89. Ibid., 625.
90. Brahms signed a manifesto protesting the “New German School” of music (e.g., Wagner and Liszt) on musical and political grounds alike. Brahms objected to “programs” such as the one Joachim Raff gave to his symphony “To My Fatherland,” a work which won a music prize in Vienna in 1863. Raff’s program to the first movement reads: “Allegro. Image of the German Character: ability to soar to great heights; trend towards introspection.” His description of the Fourth Movement is more ominous: “Allegro drammatico. Frustrated desire to lay a foundation for unity in the Fatherland” (cited in ibid., 209).
91. Ibid., 611.
92. Ibid., 612.
93. Given his rather bleak understanding of human existence, only those who resolutely face the ineluctable possibility of their own death lead “authentic” lives, according to Heidegger.
94. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 184.
95. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Lewis, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 83.
96. This may or may not be what Francis Watson had in mind in his suggestion about the testimony of music: “In the light of eternal light, [the light of musical consolation] begins to shine more steadily. It becomes, whether implicitly or explicitly, a witness” (“Theology and Music,” 460).
97. Bernstein, Unanswered Question, 424 (order slightly varied).
98. Ibid., 318.
99. Ibid., 425.